Cricket's Blockchain: Every DRS Review is a Block in the Ledger

The evening light was settling over the galleries of Mirpur's Sher-e-Bangla Stadium. In that November 2026 ODI, in the 34th over of Bangladesh's innings, Rashid Khan's delivery struck the batsman's pad with force. The on-field umpire turned down the appeal. Immediately, the review came from the dressing room. On the big screen, the three pillars of ball-tracking—pitching, impact, and wickets—lit up one by one. The final screen glowed red with the wicket indicator, and within just 37 seconds came the LBW verdict. The groan from the crowd and the celebration in the dressing room happened almost simultaneously. Those 37 seconds, to me, are a perfect example of cricket's 'blockchain.' Every review is a block; every angle, every data point is information sealed inside that block. When the blocks are joined in the correct sequence, the decision is born and becomes permanent on the ledger. But in 2026, watching the VAR debut from Russia, I first learned that no matter how accurate the screen is, a single human error can break the entire chain. Recently, I went back to the old ledger and the story changed—what actually happens inside each block of DRS, and why this technology is not perfect to me, but all too human. The first page of my ledger opened in 2026. DRS made its formal debut in the India-Sri Lanka Test in Galle. But its seed was planted sixteen years earlier—in 2026, when ball-tracking was first shown on Channel Four's 'Red Stripe' television feature. It was pure entertainment then. Today, that technology is the backbone of cricket's legal decisions—the instrument for correcting umpires' errors, or for reinforcing them. The VAR debut at the 2026 Russia World Cup was another chapter in that chain. In those 64 matches, 29 penalties were awarded and 17 on-field decisions were overturned after review. From a rented flat in Moscow, I watched every match on two monitors, recording each review's time, angle, and outcome in my ledger. My calculation put the average review time at 82 seconds. In Russia, I watched the screen become a second referee—players no longer looked at the on-field umpire; they looked at the monitor. Later, IFAB used that data to take steps to speed up the review process. But in cricket, that framework is more mature. DRS's three pillars—pitching, impact, and forward progress toward the wicket—do not just give the umpire a decision; they present the rationale behind it. On Bangladesh's canvas, this chain looks different. In the BPL, DRS has been partially used for years—sometimes without ball-tracking, sometimes with third umpires lacking proper training. One ICC dataset sits in my ledger: over the past five years, Bangladesh's national team players have a review success rate of 23 percent, against a world standard near 35 percent. The fault is not technology; it is training. A wasted review costs not just an opportunity—it costs team morale. A DRS review is actually a chain of five blocks, each containing its own mine of information. The first block—unlimited-angle cameras feeding video replays. The second—UltraEdge, which uses sound waves to prove whether the ball touched the bat or pad edge. The third—tracking software that determines the pitching point, built on video data of 30 frames per second. The fourth—Hawk-Eye's statistical model, which uses extrapolation to project the ball's future path. And the fifth, most critical block—the human being; the third umpire, who synthesizes these four layers and writes the final verdict. As in blockchain, every piece of information here is recorded. Hawk-Eye carries a mathematical margin of error of 15 millimetres; UltraEdge, due to microphone sensitivity, sometimes fails to register an edge. These gaps are like 'smart contracts'—they alter the course of the game from within the written rules. After Ben Stokes' bat sent the ball to the boundary in the 2026 World Cup final, a storm of debate followed the third umpire's decision; the umpire had acted correctly under protocol, but the camera-angle limitations kept the argument alive. The next year, the ICC reviewed the footage and ordered two additional angle cameras. That rule correction is blockchain's 'audit' concept—once an error is identified, the entire chain is re-evaluated. From my own observation—the biggest weakness of this chain sitting in domestic cricket is player training. Across the 380 Premier League matches of the 2026-17 season, I built a ledger of 1,148 yellow cards, 39 red cards, and 14 successful appeals. The numbers startled me—four clubs alone accounted for 31 percent of simulation bookings; meaning rule knowledge, decision-making, and pressure are all training matters. The same lesson applies to cricket's review system. When Bangladesh's batsmen burn two frivolous reviews in a row, that is not a technology failure—it is a training deficit in reading the game. In recent BPL seasons, I have watched young batsmen take 'reviews of frustration'; in that moment, they do not know when a review should be used. Discipline, I learned, is a ledger, not a mood—and the arithmetic of that ledger is precisely what players are not taught. This brings the question of guardianship—who owns the chain? The on-field umpire, the third umpire, the match referee, the broadcaster, and the ICC's technology committee are all links in this chain. But every link carries a touch of human judgment. In Russia in 2026, one fact kept surfacing in my 'blockchain theory' application—during VAR reviews, crowd noise, television broadcasting, and player pressure influenced the third umpire's decision time. In cricket, the effect is smaller, but not zero. In 2026, after analysing 81 Bundesliga matches played in empty stadiums during the pandemic, I found away wins rose from 21 percent to 33 percent, and second-half cards fell by 14 percent. Crowd noise influences decision-making—that is statistical truth, not speculation. The third umpire's sweet spot absorbs that pressure too; in the final over of a 40-over match, the person seated before the screen is no robot. Now, what I want to say is not a luddite rant. I have never believed in the emotional analysis that VAR or DRS is 'killing the game.' My question is different—is the weakest link in this blockchain actually not the camera, but our blind faith in human decisions? The spectator in the gallery believes what appears on the screen is final truth. But Hawk-Eye's 15-millimetre margin of error defines a zone where the ball could have gone either way—for the batsman or for the bowler. There, the third umpire's intuition, his reading, his decade of experience, all remain embedded in that decision. On the surface, DRS looks like a triumph of technology. But I have checked the ledger—in decisions overturned 'on appeal,' it is often the broadcaster who decides which angle the viewer sees and which stays hidden. The screen is a second referee, but in whose hands is the edit of that screen? What appears to the viewer as 'the most perfect evidence' is actually a frame selected by the broadcaster. This frame-dependent decision sometimes produces the opposite result—ICC's own data says 92 percent of DRS reviews confirmed the on-field decision was correct. The camera's glare often hides that very truth—that the real drama lies in two pairs of eyes, on those 22 yards. The referee's eye sees the rule before the reaction; technology exists to correct human error, but when technology's 'perfect' form itself creates fresh human blindness, the chain needs rebalancing. In the next five years, artificial intelligence will make ball-tracking extrapolation faster; perhaps one day a review will take just ten seconds. But until then, the question remains—who will care for each block in the chain? The beauty of blockchain is that every block carries a permanent imprint of information; but the one who interprets that information carries a greater duty. My ledger says—cricket's next great advancement is not in technology, but in human training. If Bangladesh's domestic structure builds review training and decision-making temperament, the review success rate will change—and that story will be written anew on my ledger's pages. However precise the blockchain becomes, in the final audit, the ledger remains in human hands.